Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 19 September 2012

issue 22 September 2012

Last weekend we stayed in a cottage at Madron, an ancient granite village in west Cornwall. A church has stood at Madron since 500 AD and there is a holy well nearby. More recently Madron and the surrounding landscape was commemorated in the poems of W.S. Graham (1918–86), who spent the latter half of his life there.

By an odd coincidence I’d brought with me a poetry anthology, snatched in haste at random from a shelf, called 100 Poems by 100 Poets, edited by Harold Pinter and others, and we were surprised to find one of Graham’s poems, ‘I leave this at your ear’, included. And then we were even more surprised to read in the introduction that the anthology was conceived by Pinter and friends on a journey from London to Madron to attend Graham’s funeral. I’d taken the poetry anthology in case of emergencies only. I hadn’t expected to be doing much reading over the weekend, nor did I.

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